Grrl Power #1337 – Nothing to 533 here
Hey look! I figured out a way to do art quicker that didn’t involve stick figures! Hah hah, well, I managed to amuse myself, anyway. Don’t worry, this gag only runs for two pages. Man, it was so hard to stop myself from putting the eyeball hot-spots in to show that eyes are wet and specular. Not that you’d actually be able to see Scooby-Doo style eyeballs in the dark anyway, but there certainly wouldn’t be a light source to cast those hots. Ignore the fact that there are eyelid shadows on the eyes, please.
So, I planned poorly. It’s page 1337 and nothing “leet” like hacking or uh, playing video games well or anything like that is on the page. Man, you guys remember when everything was 1337? That lasted like… 4 years? Maybe 6? Memory is weird. Leet-speak felt like an age of its own, and maybe it did last for 12 or 30 years, but its heyday was decidedly shorter than that. And then one day, everyone just kind of stopped transposing letters and numbers. At least publicly. I’m sure most of us have a few “P@$$w0r|)$” with internumerals still. Anyway, memory being weird with time is why everyone goes, “Abwaaaah?” when they learned that (insert movie here) came out 26 years ago! Movies have that special power to kind of live forever in our heads, and unless a particular movie is some sort of childhood keystone, I think everyone feels like every movie they saw after the age of about 16 came out roughly 7 years ago. The Matrix came out 26 years ago! God, you remember how every movie for like 5 years after that had to have a orbiting bullet time camera effect in it?
Maxima respects cops. In theory. We have a saying in America, “Ignorance of the law is not an excuse. Unless you’re a cop.” The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that cops don’t need to know the law to enforce it. Or… what they think might be the law, I guess. Basically, “a police officer’s reasonable mistake of law can provide the individualized suspicion required by the 4th Amendment to justify a traffic stop.” Which sounds like a real thin-edge of the wedge ruling to me. But cops in the U.S. receive on average two and a half months of training, and are only required to have a G.E.D. or high school diploma (though this can vary quite a bit from state to state), whereas cops in lots of other countries need a college degree and receive 18-36 months of training. So what was the Supreme Court to do? Suddenly require cops to actually know what they’re doing? In America? Get out of here.
So Maxima does theoretically respect cops, but it can be hard to maintain that optimism in the face of a lot of real world realities. Arc-SWAT is a military force with civilian law enforcement duties. She honestly considers her team elites the of law enforcement, and not just because of their powers. Of course, that said, not everyone on Arc-SWAT does have a college degree. Jabberwokky doesn’t. Heatwave has 2 years of community college under her belt. I’m… not sure if I ever said where Sydney is in her education. I feel like up until her induction into the team, she was doing like 1-2 community college classes a semester, working on transferable credits, though she had no particular major in mind and wasn’t real gung-ho about it. But she had to drop the classes she was taking when she joined the team, because a lot of her non-superhero time is now being taken up with law enforcement and legal education classes.
I’m going to try something with this new vote incentive.
This month, I’m closing on a new house, selling my Mom’s house, finishing packing Mom’s house, moving city to city to the new house, forwarding mail, canceling utilities, all that. And after that’s done, I get to start the process of selling my old house, which needs a little work before it can realistically go on the market.
SO. I’m going to try and do this vote incentive in stages. Currently it’s just pencils. The TopWebcomics one will update with colors and detail until we get to the no clothes versions, then that will continue over at Patreon. Also there will be a comic or two in between each version to fill out the story.
I know it’s hard to tell from just the pencils, but this is Heatwave and Jiggawatt. The comics will explain why they’re doing what they’re doing. Although I feel like even saying that much makes it easy to guess, but hopefully the journey will still amuse.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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OK…hear me out but what if the next fight sequence was produced like this? but interrupted with flashing lights as various beams or globes get shot around.
I remember a gag page in Marvel’s What If? in the 1980s. The top half was all white and the bottom half was all black with no details visible. The caption on the top was along the lines of “Snowbird and Moon Knight fighting Windego during a blizzard.” The lower panel had a caption that reads, “Cloak and Black Panther fighting Shade in an unlit room during a blackout.
https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/What_If%3F_Vol_1_34
about halfway down. Joke issue.
“This is even easier than collecting graft!”
That’s like the old joke of a cow eating grass. If a someone asks where’s the cow. The cow left after eating the grass.
Thought the punchline was, that the grass finished eating the cow
I did the art for that as a joke in the 1970’s. Likely the joke was floating around long before that.
Samurai Jack had a fight sequence like that. Or very similar. He was dressed all in white, while his opponent was completely in black. The environment was either solid white or solid black, giving one or the other the advantage at the time. Was a pretty cool fight sequence
I remember that one.
He was fighting a black-clad ‘Ninja’ in an old rickety tower as the sun set.
The Ninja was using the expanding shadows to hide and attack from.
Jack had been trained by a master Shinobi who taught him to hide in the light while clad in white.
Jack did cool stuff like that all the time.
Jump good.
There was a scene in one of the Richard Lester Three Musketeers movies (from the ’70s with Michael York, Oliver Reed, Charleton Heston, Faye Dunaway, Richard Chamberlain, Raquel Welch and Christopher Lee) where D’Atargnan and Rochefort are fighting in the woods at night, with a sword in one hand and a hooded lantern in the other. They’d move around in the dark, and every once in a while one of them would open their lantern to get a quick look at the state of the landscape.
Anyway, great movies, probably the best adaptations of the book.
The author of Cerebus the Aardvark said at one point that he was going to have one issue with three of his characters in a small dark room and just have speech bubbles. I think it was while he was having trouble with his drawing hand.
I don’t know if he ever did it.
Isn’t that pretty much how “Rogue One” ended? With Vader in a dimly lit corridor with Rebel meat-sacks?
Dim lighting makes it a lot easier to use a CGI Vader. There’s a reason for all those dimly lit movies with blue or green filters.
I think that may have been one reason for the most recent failure of 3D. You can post-process a movie that hasn’t been done with 3D cameras so it will run in 3D, but it will be very dim as you’re dividing the available light in half.
It is entirely possible that one actually advantage to having been largely disconnected from pop culture for most of my childhood, is that I never feel “old.” I don’t even feel that much out-of-sync…I still like the kind of stuff I liked as a kid, I guess. Looking back just the last 25 years…yeah, no, the same nerdy kid stuff. Be it 80’s retro, or newer iterations, my interests haven’t changed much, and I never find myself feeling like, “I’m too old for his.” ^_^’
I have the sneaking suspicion that the generations before us (well, I’m a Millenial) felt remarkably similar, they just didn’t have the same amount of tech gadget to gauge it with.
(GenX enters the chat, munching on pork rinds and actively dipping them in salsa) mmm, yeah. I guess maybe, I dunno. Don’t do the cargo shorts and Op t-shirt thing. Now it’s whatever shirt is on sale, but the cargo pockets are now on my kilt. Which is way better than the way things used to be…now, time to fix these pumps for the boss’s lava moat in the central chamber. (hobbles off in a spry GenX that had the kind of active life that is full of regrets but had fun doing it all) (over the shoulder) oh and as far as that whole WWIII thing? Yeah, two things. One it’s WWI phase three and yer on yer own kid, but you might want to get some poptarts and learn to eat them without electricity.
Eh, I’m on the tail end of GenX and I’ll still wear cargo shorts or pants as I please, the pockets are too convenient and I don’t feel obligated to please the fashion sense of someone else especially if they are not paying my bills.
I also have plain black “dad” sketchers and my comfort is chief there too for similar reasons.
And the only thing making me feel old is my older family members dying and my back hurting. Everything else has been largely the same to me for decades now.
So, plain black sketchers are the new/old white new balance? Got it. Goes along with the shift from white tube socks to black, I guess.
Don’y say Gendarme without precision say rather National Gendarmerie Intervention Group or in French GIGN – Groupe d’intervention de la Gendarmerie nationale – it’s more like her job , and the training and selection process is at the seals level.
Gendarmerie range from the rural cop to the GIGN.
The GIGN is a specific French group, while Gendarmes is the term for paramilitary police used in most French-speaking countries. Other countries have similar organisations that are national law enforcement that are a wing of the military.
You also have organisations like the RCMP that are called Gendarmerie in French (Gendarmerie royale du Canada) because they traditionally have either some form of military functions, a military status, or both as in the case of the RCMP (they are also a Regiment of Dragoons).
RCMP are descended from Dragoons but have never been a “regiment” of any description. Dragoons WERE used to keep order in the days when there was no police force, and had quite an ugly reputation
Always thought the Gendarme were just the Frog Cops, like the Brit Bobbies and the Yankee Pigs
In Paris the Gendarmerie had Assault Rifles/SMGs, wore camo, beret and paratrooper boots during the subway bombings back in the 90’s. You knew they had a military background because they would salute a allied foreign officer upon sighting at the airports.
‘Was a hilarious trip on Matra-Marconi’s dime through England-France-Belgium despite the local tensions.
Yeah, it was an old thought, the French police were just as distinctive as the British with their hats
In old french slang the called les poulets or la volaille -the chikens , the poultry- in actual slang it’s les keuf or les condés , flic is akin to cop it’s not a pejorative term.
Gendarmes is literally “gens d’armes”, men-at-arms.
Not French, barely understand English
Just be glad didn’t call them ‘Garcon’
Well, at least with someone who can actually see in that low light, there’s no one likely to be eaten by a grue.
Unless it is Gru, and then you have to watch out for Kevin and Bob
We’ve occasionally had D&D parties where everyone had nightvision so we didn’t have to mess with lanterns. More frequently there’s like one human who would get ribbed for needing a light source.
13 years ago on Pathfinder campaing our party had made a night ambush without light source. against bandits
3 half-elves (a Cavalier, a Magus and a gunslinger) an a dwarf (my character ,a druid )…
That’s when if you’re the DM you have plenty of luminous lichens and glowing mushroom and radiant crystals laying around just to mess with them.
I guess it makes sense that Max can’t see in the dark. She doesn’t have a perception section of power to pool into. So maybe at best she gets a tangential clarity/movement tracking increase the higher her speed gets.
Also, people sure do love to go on tangents when Maxima is asking serious questions—seriously good questions, too, compared to confronting the person she suspects based on one weird conversation.
She would have to have some sort of super-speed perception, or else when she moves points into speed she’d be moving too much faster than she can react. I don’t think it would be simple reflexes, more like “I have to plan ahead so I can move through the door instead of the wall.”
That would be more being sped up in general – thinking, reactions, etc. than – perception specifically. Maxima can disassemble a grenade in mid-air, after all.
Her retinal cells would have to sense properly with fewer photons. It’s rather like reducing the exposure time in a camera – you need more light, or a more sensitive sensor (usually with fewer pixels) or you get a darker picture.
Cellphones have adjusted mostly by adding more lenses and interpolating things computationally. The first isn’t really available to Max; not sure about the second.
Of course, comic books don’t normally go into this stuff. Or they suggest that e.g. a speedster isn’t really speeding up, since lots of things (like not being able to see or breathe or trouble with doors) just don’t come up. Something else is happening, but exactly what isn’t usually explored (I imagine *someone* does it, but I haven’t seen it).
At least she is less impacted by that than most others, because in a pinch she can use her glowing finger to create light.
7RU3 1337 |\|3\/3R D13S
01110111 01101111 01110010 01100100 00100001
An interesting point of view could be langage spoken by each the member of arc team…
Maxima I think Spanish, and modern Standard Arabic if y recal correctly
Anvil shes’ american an she had a college degree , spanish probably , French no , if she is from upper classes and she’s born 28 years ago in 2008 (1980) perhaps German …
Someone with an interesting collection of langages could be Ingsol ( 700 years but from where ? European, Byzantine ? The fall of Constantinople is in 1453 – if he was already a vampire at this date – .
Latin is obviously in the langage understood by Ingsol … And potenficies in ancien Greek, perhaps also modern one and Turk are likely if he cames from Byzantine empire, Arab also.
Been awhile since we heard from Crimson, but who are those others with her?
Technically, we still haven’t seen Crimson :P
Hence the “heard from,” I presume.
As for the others, the one with multiple eyes I think might be the spider chick who captured the underage succubus, the yellow-eyes one might be the lady with true sight, and the green eyes… I’ve got no clue.
From the shape my guess is the yellow one is Specs. Is she the one you meant? Participated with the fight with said Spider gal to rescue Sydney.
Fairly sure ‘spider chick’ would be locked up somewhere: assault and attempted kidnap and murder are serious crimes
Yellow-eyes? You mean Specs?
Aranea has normal human eyes in both quantity and color: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-812-specism/
It’s possible they got confuzzled about her visor, but those were weird sigils not eyes
And she was very bummed out during the meeting. She started her entire questioning about dungeons by talking about being turned into a wererabbit of all things.
Why would Max speak Spanish? I suppose she learned Arabic in the military?
Anvil, I’d always envisaged her as some sort of Cajun or Creole, speaking American English and Louisiana French.
In Texas it’s pretty handy to speak Spanish due proximity to Mexico and it’s the most spoken foreign langage in US – in 2020 42.03 million of US residents speak Spanish at home -.
And t it’s an handy langage in America , central america and the majority of south america have Spanish as official langage, only Brazil speak Portuguese …
For me a french born and breed Maxima as not any cajun or acadien vibe… and cajun french is in verge of disparition.
Cajun French is intelligible for me a French native speaker born in France.
Archon is located in the lone star state ..
Oh, Archon is in Texas?
It was Anvil I envisaged as Louisuana Creole, not Max
I misunderstood , Anvil had been in Senegal and Anvil don’t speak french … In #959 – Enchanting 101 she use the term EKWENSU OCHA ( white devil in Igbo) she seem to have Igbo origin – and if she don’t speak french
she had probably Nigerian or Cameroonian origins…
And if she speaks German Cameroonian origins from a family who emigrated to US after 1884 prior 1914 could be on spot.
OK, if she speaks Igbo she is of Nigerian origin.
I think that was an Ace Ventura reference?
GIYF! It seems to be, yes. Mind you she IS called Kenya… is that a clue?
Heatwave would sound like Gretchen Wilson or maybe Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs. Some sort of “cracker” anyway.
Math sounds sort-of English. Like Hugh Laurie in “House”.
Do we know where Sydney is from?
Hugh Laurie’s American accent in House was so good many in the US couldn’t believe he was actually English.
At least at first.
For me, Math sounds somewhat like Stifler out of American Pie.
Nah, Math sounds like Vegeta, the FourStar version :P
Matthew Rhys (The Americans, Saturday Night) has an incredibly good American accent (he’s Welsh).
Peggy is some sort of country girl, but with a learned accent to cover it.
The Colonel (General? I forget) sounds like a late-career Tom Hanks.
Jabberwokky sounds like she has escaped from Top Cat.
General Faulk is modeled after Dan Hedaya (The Usual Suspects, Alien Resurrection), so I’m pretty sure he sounds like Dan Hedaya.
Surely General Faulk is modelled after Peter Faulk (Columbo)?
Falk*
Nope. DaveB has mentioned Dan Hedaya when talking about General Faulk, and the resemblance is strong. I think he’s more specifically modeled after General Perez in Alien: Resurrection.
General Faulk reminds me of Dean Stockwell.
Those black-out gags are old news. One of the Tex Avery-era Looney Tunes (Screwy Squirrel?) has the character in the dark. There is a tremendous crash, and they say “gee, that was a funny gag; too bad you couldn’t see it!”
To be honest, nothing in Kat’s characterization so far impressed me as her being especially clever, esp. for the standards of an elite supernatural enforcer group such as Semper Vigilantis, the top 10% nonetheless. She seems no Krona material. I even struggle to see her as top decile for the much less rigorous standards of mundane cops, which aren’t that great to begin with. In my country we often make jokes of our gendarmerie not being the sharpest knifes in the drawer. Maybe if we assume Keystone Cops as the standard.
So all of this comes to me as an Informed Attribute used for here for the sake of plot railroading. Nothing must get in the way of the Outing Sciona high-speed train.
By the way, Kat might even have noticed the aide in passing. The main issue is, unless she is blessed with exceptional memory (which would be another Informed Attribute), she would have no good reason to remember her months after the fact. She did not spoke the aide, who stayed in the background, and there were much more memorable participants to a discussion on much more interesting tropes. Having a tattoo is not that noteworthy.
Kat did not speak to the aide, nor did the aide speak to her. The aide did not speak at all during the actual meeting and was in the background instead while the senator spoke. And Kat seemed focused mostly on the sandwiches and how she was new to all this because she recently got turned into a wererabbit (of all things – her word because she is still annoyed about it) against her will.
She also hasnt been that observant in other cases, like where she JUST kicked that cement mixer and almost hit someone else with it because she wasn’t paying attention since she was angry about her predicament.
Nothing about her her has struck me as being particularly observant, at least not currently since she’s still in that ‘why did this happen to me’ lamenting phase.
I thought that.
While I agree this feels like “an Informed Attribute used for here for the sake of plot railroading”, and that Kat should not remember Sciona based on what we’ve seen during the scene they shared a room in, I just wanted to note that while it’s been a year and a half for us, it appears to have been roughly 1-2(maybe a bit more) weeks for them, not months. The one notable time skip was “Roughly a week later” (page #1323) which was at least half a day, possibly more, before the current page.
TL;DR at the bottom.
Between the meeting and said timeskip, there was:
Parfait’s summoning(same day as the meeting probably– New Mexico to DC is like 4-7 hours by commercial airline, apparently, but Max probably has access to something better); the following chat(same day);
The demons arriving/Lapha latching on to Sydney(the next day, considering Dabbler mentions having consumed “magic potions last night”–though considering the demons booked expensive travel, and also Tenri needed to get kidnapped, after Parfait had been there long enough to post to social media, that feels like it should’ve been more than a day);
Lapha’s sealing(a day later, presumably); Max visiting her boyfriend, Rowan(possibly the same day); Mob stuff(presumably same day); Sydney hurting her groin/Max back at work(also presumably same day, but at this point the day feels super packed);
Sciona and the politician/Math vs Aliens/tale of how Peggy Lost her leg/Peggy getting a new one/Sciona getting a date(ending a day)
TL;DR at least 3, but I assume 4 days passed(actually, reasonably more *should* have, but Dave seems to have just packed the days as much as possible).
Paired with “roughly a week”(plus at least one day), 3-4 days means 1-2 weeks. Still I agree that Kat should not recall the aide.
New Mexico to DC? Where are you getting DC from for that? Assuming you’re correct in that meeting being in New Mexico (instead of California, like I’d thought), there is nothing showing Max and Dabbler went to DC for any reason. The got a flight back to Archon HQ, which Dave has previously confirmed to be in Dallas, TX. Unless you’re thinking the meeting happened in DC, in which case I’m wondering where New Mexico comes in. [insert think emoji here]
The Senator meeting about funding the dungeon was in DC. So was Maxima’s Galytn Tech Trade meeting (and I think Dabbler was on standby there according to the Senator there) before that.
ARCHON HQ is in Dallas.
I have no idea what took place in New Mexico. Before the Galytn meeting in DC was Sydney and Dabbler and Anvil in Senegal, and before that was Galytn.
Whooops. I misremembered, Dave’s author’s note on page 1191 “Maxima and Dabbler flew back from their DC meeting on a plane” as “Maxima and Dabbler flew back to DC from their meeting on a plane”(New Mexico likely came about due to memories that being their current location, and me presuming the meeting was held where it was relevant or from some offhand line between 1172 and here). My bad.
Well, the distance is shorter then, but ultimately changes none of the timeline beyond making “day 1″‘s length more reasonable.
“Observant”, not “clever”. Does she notice things? And honestly, I would strongly guess she does, especially if her theraform has any impact on her human form–prey species are in a constant state of high alert outside their dens, because a prey animal that isn’t on high alert isn’t going to be around long enough to make a difference.
Also, there’s a difference between having perfect recall and not remembering something someone expressly calls to mind. The tattoo, in particular, would absolutely stand out in a Congressional aide. Image is everything in DC, and if you deviate from the norm, it’s going to be bold-and-upfront, or it’s going to be concealed as best as possible.
At no point do E-Sci do anything in that meeting to warrant extra attention being made to her, which is kinda the point of being an aide, at least a good one
“The tattoo, in particular, would absolutely stand out in a Congressional aide” The tattoo was under regrowing hair, and a very similar color to said hair. Max, got up close and personal, held a conversation. There is no indication Kat got close to her, or studied her. In basically every shot after they seated themselves, Kat and Sciona are some of the furthest people from each other in the room. Kat was also focused on food and the discussion.
A dark tattoo under fledgling dark hair is not something that “would absolutely stand out” from… what? 25? 30 feet? away, on someone. Maybe, maybe Kat stopped, in the middle of the other 7 people entering the room, to study the aide, who remained in a vague path obstructing position where it’d be reasonable for someone to slow and look at her, rather than not obstruct traffic… but if so, Dave chose not to show or indicate that.
Not commenting on the story per se, but from my (admittedly limited) experience, even something like a the regrowing hair would stand out like a sore thumb in the capitol. At least among those who know the norm, or are observant enough to recognize that this person doesn’t look like every other political staffer.
I might agree in a room with a bunch of uptight looking professional types, though I’d hold that she could have gotten the position either by being good at her job, enough that the cut doesn’t matter– some people have pasts they grow out of. Or that someone(important family, powerful reference, etc)/politics might have gotten her that position.
Aides aren’t going to be as public facing as the senators themselves. As I understand, some mostly do research, set up meetings and/or answer phones… none of which involve appearance(beyond maybe going in person to set up a meeting).
But this wasn’t a room with a bunch of uptight looking professional types anyway. It was a room with a large man with a massive X scar on his face, a woman with bright blue gradient hair in an eye-catching pink shirt, another woman with bright gradient red hair wearing a bustier, arm bands and a chocker, a man wearing a sigil patterned red robe, a woman with gold skin and purple hair and a couple men in turtlenecks under their suits(which they then took off in the relaxed atmosphere)… Sciona might’ve stood out in a setting where people were predominantly “normal” but this was a space full of “unprofessional” looks and/or relaxed decorum. And that’s before counting the Alari and Scourger.
It was a room with the focal point being on the senator who represents the United States Government to get the project moving being the most important person in the room.
She was the one giving him notes telling him what to do. EVERYBODY noticed Sciona.
Obviously not Kat, who was focused on her moping and her snacks
You miiight want to reread that section, because I believe you are quite misremembering it. People were looking, predominantly, at whoever was speaking at the moment(and heck Kat in particular spent as much time focused on her food as the speakers), not the senator. The senator was not the focus. You can literally see in most panels where people are looking.
“She was the one giving him notes telling him what to do” Uh, no. She gave him *one* note, which he briefly looked at, before moving to adjourn the meeting, leaving it rather obviously open on the table, where someone(e.g. the vampires who probably have superior vision, though not Sydney glasses vision) might be able to glance at it.
“EVERYBODY noticed Sciona.” Really? You have evidence of that? Because other than Max, whose attention she pulled, most of them are not shown to look her way once.
(Also, “senator who represents the United States Government”, they represent a State, not the the whole of the goverment.)
Kat’s main character trait so far has been her angst and self-pity for not becoming one of the ‘cool’ (predator/megafauna) were types. People wallowing in self-pity notoriously tend to be rather self-focused and hence unlikely to be observant. We saw this trait displayed recently when she wrecked stuff in a violent temper tantrum and almost injured co-workers. If she had good observational talents either from her pre-change personality or from her were type, atm they do not seem any noticeable and should be mostly subdued by her angst.
If we want to give the situation a benigh interpretation, this Informed Attribute might well be a Chekov’s Gun, an additional layer of her personality that may make her less mono-dimensional in the long term but does not seem to play a relevant role atm. However, if we take it in the context of all the other contrived stuff we have seen unfolding since the beginning of this event sequence, the natural assumption is this is yet another asspull to railroad the plot to out Sciona.
Moreover, as it concerns the tattoo, the simplest assumption for Max to make is it was something the aide got done to her before she got the job, as a rebellious youth or the like. Nonetheless, she got the job either b/c she seemed very qualified for it, she had connections, or a mix of both.
Sometime between the meeting and her coming to supervise the construction site, she realized the tattoo was ill-fitting her current situation and/or had a change of heart about her looks. Instead of waiting for her natural brown hair to regrow and cover the tattoo, she got a white wig or a combo of white dye and extensions.
Dave, do they call them Pork Scratchings there? I had to Google it to check my guess, but I’ve never seen/heard that before. Amusingly, I am familiar with the alternatives. “Pork scratchings are also known as pork crackling, chicharrones, or pork rinds.”
Believe it’s largely a branding thing (or maybe just a regional thing)
Have a packet of scratchings and crackles (both from the same company), plus ‘crispy strips’
I’ve never heard of them being called anything except Pork Rinds or chicharrones (and to be fair for a long time I thought Chicharrones was a brand name of pork rinds. :)
Do… we want to see the Nocturne with six eyes in the daylight? Or simply under florescents?
Obviously six-eyes is Raven from Teen Titans in her demonic form :)
So, that’s Jiggs on door-duty, was wondering who that was
How do you know that?
Because she is listed under Characters, and she seems to be welding without equipment or gear
The bit about the Navy SEALS reminds me… here’s a link to a youtube video by an ex-SEAL who is complaining about how a lot of SEALS and ex-SEALS think they can beat a UFC champion. My favorite part is ten minutes in, when he notes, “SEALS really haven’t done a whole lot in the last fifteen years, because they botched so many missions in the late 2000s that Special Operations Command lost trust in their organization. Green Berets, Delta Force, and Rangers have done the lion’s share of combat over the last fifteen years.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCluY2ybqZE
An old Ranger I used to hang with said they called it BUDS disease, those SEALs though that just getting through that made them BAMFs that could take out anyone. The trainees did not know that BUDS had no fixed final exam, they just whittled them down to how many opening they had presently budgeted for , and thus the quality really did vary.
What made it insightful was this guy’s Ranger company was cited for multiple rescues of various elite teams from all the services and of course SEALs were the problem child of needing extractions.
It seems to me that ArcSwat’s training would actually be sufficient to grant a bachelor’s degree in Criminal Justice
Possibly, likely even. But then you get into the difference between training and credentials. I have a master’s degree in psychology and through ongoing training, continuing education and experience working with competency for trial and assessment of dangerousness I could go toe to toe with a lot of PhDs at the time of my retirement. What I didn’t have were the credentials. I could and did do a lot of the grunt work of doing assessments, writing treatment plans and so on. I could and did testify regarding some things in court but I couldn’t do determinations of competency for trial since I didn’t have the credentials. From the point of view of the court there was no difference between me and someone who could fake it well but was just pulling things out of their butt. Unless ArcSwat established an affiliation with a university people going through the training would have skills/knowledge useful to the organization but which wouldn’t be applicable elsewhere.
Generally correct, but I suspect much of the training could be converted to credits, at least, which could be used to get to an Associate’s, if nothing else.
It’s definitely doable. I had a side gig teaching part time at the local community college. As part of the orientation for new Psychiatric Nursing Assistants (PNAs) took a class called “Intro to Social Learning”. There were several of us from the facility where we worked who took turns teaching the course and the new hires got a college credit. You just have to partner up with an academic institution. Given the depth of knowledge within ARC such an institution could probably develop a degree path. BMSA, Bachelor’s in the Management of the Super Abled.
Nope. DaveB has mentioned Dan Hedaya when talking about General Faulk, and the resemblance is strong. I think he’s more specifically modeled after General Perez in Alien: Resurrection.
I get it’d be extra work you don’t need right now but a “nocturnal” version of this would be really cool down the line.
Eurielle’s Catch me if you can as Sciona’s theme song?
Oh please, if an Officer was required to be able to recite at random any law on the books before being able to stop someone from performing an act of violence against someone or disrupting their peaceful enjoyment of life and property, then nobody would ever be arrested or charged. “Whoops, you didn’t include Article 364 subsection 7(a)(iii)(4b) while making the arrest so the person who drove drunk into a daycare not only walks, but you’re required to fix his car and pay his bar tab”. Mind you, it’s pretty close to that in the courts now, but holding an Officer responsible for quoting every single law on the books, federal, State, Local, or part of any Act or Regulation immediately and without delay is not only completely ludicrous, it’s a safety hazard and an insult to every law abiding citizen depending on them for protection. Of course the courts have also ruled that you can’t expect the police to protect you because that’s not their job and that you have no right to self-defence so you pretty much have to hope they can find your killer and charge him with enough detail that a shyster lawyer doesn’t get them off.
What’s a “law abiding citizen” if nobody’s expected to know what the laws actually are, and it all just runs on vibes?
And if the job of the police isn’t to protect the public, then what are they there for?
They are there to protect the Owners from the riffraff. American police are directly descended from slave patrols.
American police existed in places where there were no slaves, where slavery was not practiced, and where they would not return escaped slaves to the South.
That’s a massive distortion. Cops can get away with arresting people for things that aren’t illegal, and almost never face any consequences. They’re shielded from liability from even fairly egregious rights violations unless the victim can find a court decision that matches their behavior exactly. This includes behavior that, if you really need to be told that’s improper, you really shouldn’t be a cop.
You don’t need the entire book of law to know the relevant laws for your job and you don’t need to be able to cite it by section to understand it enough to do your job.
Also in the case of the american system knowing case law isn’t really needed.
A patrolling cop doesn’t need to know border, financial and cooperate law.
Civil law and the law surrounding arrests is enough.
Inspectors need to know
I’m a programmer and would be pretty fucked if I didn’t know the general rule of law in my area.
Laws I think a cop should know are: the relevant rules and regulations around their own behavior while in uniform(entrapment, proper arrest, etc) and the law about the top 10000 crimes they’re likely to spot.
More important though is that citizens are supposed to know the law and they can’t use ignorance as an excuse if they violate it and since a cop is a citizen too they should at least be held to the same standard.
a.k.a you may not know the law, but that is a you issue and the law treats you like you do, because otherwise it just becomes a bunch of vibes.
If an engineer designs a building that doesn’t comply with the regulations they’re the ones liable if it goes wrong even if they didn’t know the law.
If a barber doesn’t obey the food and safety regulations they’re the ones that goes to prison even if they didn’t know them.
A cook can be imprisoned for not following proper safety regulations(, but not necessarily know them).
The only people who can in my opinion and the one of the law get away with this excuse in a limited sense are kids.
Where in “should know the law they’re enforcing” does it say “must recite it while on the job”? A surgeon is required to have an extensive medical education, not so they can explain in detail what they’re doing before they perform the first incision, but so they actually know what they’re doing in a situation that can potentially result in death if mishandled.
Wasn’t there a post about Sydney’s education, or lack of it? Not that it matters. Sydney is so lairy that she will never finish anything she starts
How long have you waited to do that “leet” joke?
::coughs:
Since she is in charge and she is very shiny and very golden…
Your Majesty is like a stream of bat’s piss.
Prince: What?
Whistler: It was one of Wilde’s.
Oscar: It sodding was not! It was Shaw!
Shaw: (Michael Palin) I… I merely meant, Your Majesty, that you shine out like a shaft of gold when all around is dark.
I assume this sequence is at least in partially prompted by the comments on previous pages, though I can’t be sure, since there are neither Author’s Comments, nor author comments.(I know the audience has received responses occasionally in the past, but not always/necessarily even often)
If not, and this was always planned, fair enough. Sometimes I ascribe motives that simply don’t exist.
If so though, I think, honestly, at this point an author’s note on the topic at hand would be a bit beneficial, even if it’s just a note that says “this is how I want to do it, and this is what’s being done.
A large part of the audience has been cultivated around the long ago premise of a “realistic superhero fantasy comic”, tackling stuffs such as fridge logic and the things that get handwaved by writers, and also intelligent people on both(or more) sides, rather than just people who are called “intelligent”, but are actually quite stupid outside of magicking up some “scientific earthquake device” or some-such. This means a lot, but not all, or even necessarily most, of us are inclined to pick apart “inconsistencies”/”issues”, whether or not they exist.
That said, if it is firmly decided that “Hey, I hear you, but this is how it’s going to be”… well, we can still complain/comment, but the sense of finality sets in, and tearing the topic apart holds less value.
I strongly hold that Kat appeared distracted enough during those scenes, was far away enough, wasn’t at a reasonable angle, there were many reasonable distractions and Sciona was a non-presence enough, *etc*, that Max is being unreasonable(assuming nothing happened off-camera, though that would feel unfair for the same reason as a detective on a motel tv going “Hey, I read a confession by the killer off-screen, that the audience didn’t see” feels unfair), but it isn’t my comic, and I can write fanfiction if it bugs me that much. Knowing, though, helps make that choice.
I dunno who’s talking in the dark… but perhps you/they meant “Pork Cracklin’? (or “Chicharrones”)
(“Yer nawt frum thuh Saouth, areya?”)
Or, they are not American, we have Pork Scratchings down here, and Crackling
Just like some people call all soda’s “Coke” (or “Pepsi”), or fizzy drinks can be ‘soda’ or ‘pop’, or simply… ‘fizzy drinks’)
I don’t feel old when I hear/read something was released 25 years ago, I feel old when I see “50th anniversary edition” of music I listened to or bought when I was growing up. I remember when JFK was shot in 1963 62 years ago. a few weeks ago I downloaded “Tubular Bells 50th Anniversary Edition” 2 hours and 25 minutes long with the additional versions done for the Queen’s silver jubilee, and the 2012 London Olympics, plus the demos and alternate takes. Tubular Bells is one of my meditation mix on Amazon Music…
It’d be funny if the ‘Pork scratchings’ person is a supernatural with bioluminescent chest markings and Max has been talking to her boobs.
or, lol, that’s where their eyes are!
Well, I don’t exactly recall Maxima having detective skills. :p
Fun fact: it typically takes twice as much training to get a barber’s license in the US as to become a cop.
Well obviously. You might nick someone, or harms their self esteme. Some people would rather die than go out with a bad haircut.
And some people pay hundreds of dollars for a shitty haircut and then go on a red carpet or some other event to show it off
The problem with that is Barbers do have to typically go through 1500-2000 hours of training. Which is under a year’s worth of time (2080 hours for 40 hours a week and 52 weeks in a year).
A cop, while yes, academy is only 16 weeks (400 hours), the on the job training (staying with a training officer) is another 12 months of time. So their training is longer.
so, when you apply for one but get the other, it’s a close shave either way?
Just in case you forgot that, Crimson is the young vampire who can turn into a flock of bats.
Who is that comment directed at?
Those who may have forgotten it, just like me, and decided to look it up in the comments before starting to dig deep into character tags.
Ah yes. No México. No America. Only A Gulf of Difference. :3
Seeing as they’re building a magical reactor, will the workers have to wear magic dose meters? (Like for nuclear exposure)
Harry Turtledove’s stand-alone novel The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump (1993) may be relevant – in that one magical industries have a lot of dangerous byproducts, most of which are best described as seriously nasty curses. Good fun if you like magitech alternative worlds.
call in the Garuda now!
That man was all over the place in his stories.
Sluggy Freelance occasionally resorted to stick figures, but xkcd made them rock.
Is that Bart Simpson sitting at the hedge of the … hole, in image #1? Looks like his head, but the body is too big…
It’s Jiggawatt arc-welding something.